The present invention relates to memory defragmentation in a portable radio telephone apparatus.
It is common practice in portable radio telephone apparatus to store user names and numbers into records of fixed length. This is wasteful in memory terms as short record entries occupy the same amount as long record entries.
To overcome this problem, variable length records can be employed. Variable length records occupy approximately only the memory space of the record entries which they are required to store. Because of the nature of variable length records, repeated storing and deletion of records causes memory fragmentation which if left unchecked will eventually lead to loss of storage capacity. To prevent this from happening some form of memory management scheme must be carried out to defragment the memory and restore contiguous record storage. All possible defragmentation schemes must relocate the records within the memory space. Record relocation in the field, portable radio telephone apparatus is problematic because of the ever-present threat of the user disrupting the power supply by removing the battery. If the battery were removed during record relocation, record data is highly likely to be lost irretrievably.